The man scheduled to be executed by the State of Missouri shortly after midnight Wednesday morning has said he’s ready to die. If his execution is carried out, it will be Missouri’s ninth since November.

43-year-old Michael Shane Worthington pled guilty in 1999 to strangling his neighbor, 24-year-old Melinda Griffin, in her Lake St. Louis condo in 1995 and was sentenced to death. He now says that confession was false – that his attorneys at the time told him to confess and their plan was to get him off on appeal later.

Worthington says he doesn’t remember what happened the night of Griffin’s murder, but says he could have been involved.

He tells Missourinet his execution won’t hurt him or help Griffin’s family, but it will hurt his loved ones.

“It’s going to crush my baby sister. It’s going to crush my baby nephew and my brothers and my mother – not my biological mother, I’m talking about my step mom, and my aunt Janet,” says Worthington. “The only people that are going to hurt are them … I only get emotional when I think about them.”

Worthington, like other condemned men, attorneys and death penalty critics, says the secrecy surrounding Missouri’s death penalty procedures has robbed inmates of the chance to make sure their deaths won’t be painful, in violation of the Constitution.